Southwest Issues.

It's Midnight

Are Your Children At Home?

Village Curfews Aim To Keep Teenagers Out Of Trouble

December 05, 1993|By Jody Temkin. Special to the Tribune.

For Peotone High School senior Kelsay Shaw and her sophomore sister, Tristan, curfew is something that can change on a daily basis. Nowhere in the Shaw house is it written in granite that they have to be home by 10 p.m., 11 p.m. or later.

"It depends more on what they're doing," said their father, Connor, "and what's happening the following day."

That doesn't mean, though, that there are no boundaries. "There's always a limit," Shaw said, "always times that they have to be home by. It's usually before midnight, but it can be later, particularly if it's something like going to prom and then going out to eat."

Flexibility is the key word when it comes to curfews for teens in the southwest suburbs, and that flexibility applies to police as well as parents.

Not only do curfew times vary from municipality to municipality, but the degree to which the curfews are enforced and the subsequent punishments also differ. Law enforcement officials admit they exercise a great deal of flexibility in deciding whom to charge and whom to let go.

Illinois has a state curfew of 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and midnight Friday and Saturday for children under age 17 who are not accompanied by an adult. The majority of municipalities in the suburbs mirror the state guidelines. A minority have enacted their own, earlier municipal curfews.

The City of Chicago is one of the places with an earlier curfew of 10:30 p.m. on weeknights and 11:30 p.m. on weekends for children under age 17. A 10 p.m. weeknight curfew and 10:30 p.m. weekend curfew is on the books in Posen for children under 18 years old. First offenders are taken to the station and their parents are called and warned about the curfew. Repeat offenders are issued a citation and have to appear in court.

As in most suburbs, though, Posen police don't haul every curfew violator off to the police station. "Some latitude is given to the officers," said Sgt. Steven Leveille. "If there's a Friday night football game that doesn't get out 'til late or some dance, if verification can be made, then they'll be given a pass.

"But if they're just hanging around on corners or hanging around in town, that's when we enforce the curfew."

From town to town, the consequences of breaking curfew can vary from simply driving the teens home and warning them and their parents about curfew, to writing tickets and having parents pick up the children at the police station, to imposing $250 fines and having cars of curfew-violating drivers towed away, as they do in Aurora.

Police say they encounter myriad responses from parents when they bring curfew violators home, or ask parents to come to the station to pick them up. Some are grateful to the officers for getting their children safely off the streets. Others believe that the child's curfew and whereabouts should be a family matter, not a government concern.

Carol Dean, who has two sons at Naperville North High School, said state-imposed curfews can serve as a backup to the rules at home and help support parents' rules. "One of the advantages of a community-enforced curfew," she said, "is it gives backbone for parents to be able to say if you're under 17, you must be in by 11. I find it very helpful."

No matter what the city, curfew laws are not vigorously enforced, and there is no hard data showing curfews to have a significant impact on crime, said John Hood, research director of the John Locke Foundation, a public policy think tank in Raleigh, N.C.

If police picked up all curfew violators in all parts of a city, they'd be spreading themselves too thin, Hood said. On the other hand, if they target particular neighborhoods, "they open themselves up to charges of selective enforcement and discrimination."

Curfews also cause problems for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has assisted in challenging curfew laws in several cities.

The ACLU has historically been against curfews, said Valerie Phillips, public information director in the Chicago office, because "the laws criminalize otherwise lawful behavior, they restrict and violate the laws of association . . . and we also think these ordinances interfere with the parent-child relationship. Parents should be able to set hours and activities for their child and deal with breaches of parental curfews."

But when parents either can't or won't enforce their own curfews, and municipalities begin having problems with teens, they sometimes turn to curfew laws for help. This summer in Manhattan, police began enforcing a 10 p.m. curfew for those under age 16 that had been on the books for years but hadn't been enforced rigidly. Unruly behavior on the streets at night by teens and the calls of complaints from neighbors led to the change.

"We used to not really enforce it as long as the kids weren't a problem," said Police Chief William Harris, adding that the new policy was having an effect. "They're adhering to it."